Cloud and Datacenter Networking (3 CFU)

Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica

Prof. Roberto Canonico

Course syllabus

A.A. 2016-17

Course schedule

PDF slides will be published on this site after each lesson.

Lesson no. Date Slides / References Topics
1 07/03/2017 Course introduction.
Datacenter architecture and organization.
Rack layout. Cabling. TIA-942 Standard.
Air conditioning and cooling plant. Power.
Energy efficiency of a datacenter. Power Usage Effectiveness.
Datacenter Tiers (UpTime Institute classification).
Modular datacenters.
Small-scale sample datacenter layouts.
2 14/03/2017 Ethernet switching basic concepts.
VLANs. VLAN trunking.
Inter-VLAN routing. Multi-layer switches and Virtual Switch Interfaces. Datacenter networking infrastructure.
Access layer and aggregation layer. Access layer: ToR and EoR organizations.
Bandwidth aggregation techniques.
IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation. IEEE 802.1ax Link Aggregation Protocol LACP.
3 21/03/2017 Switching theory fundamentals. Head-of-Line blocking.
Clos networks. Clos theorem.
Loop management in Ethernet networks. STP protocol.
Datacenter networks: aggregation layer.
Datacenter network infrastructure evolution.
Fat-tree topology. Leaf-spine topology.
Some examples of large scale datacenter networks.
4 28/03/2017 Fat-tree: a scalable, commodity data center network architecture.
Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) and its use in datacenter networks.
Multiple path routing in datacenter networks. Equal cost multi-path (ECMP).
Improving ECMP load balancing with Flowlets (FLARE).
Virtualization technologies and their use in modern datacenters.
A Linux-based hypervisor: KVM.
Introduction to VM networking.
Hardware support to virtualization in modern NICs: SR-IOV.
5 10/04/2017
  • Slides available here (Materiale didattico) for UNINA students
SEMINAR "From Ethernet switching to virtual and programmable switching" - Prof. Stefano Secci, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), Paris, France.
This talk will resume the evolution of Ethernet switching and transport in the recent past, including IEEE 802.1 family of solutions and recent IETF solutions as well. We will then describe the challenges introduced by system virtualization and network programming in terms of switching and mapping capabilities for the switching fabric. The impact on data-center network architecture design will be presented as well.
6 11/04/2017
  • Slides available here (Materiale didattico) for UNINA students
SEMINAR "Embedding protocols for virtualized networks" - Prof. Stefano Secci, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), Paris, France.
This talk will present recent protocols defined for communications between virtual machines, in the network virtualization era where virtual machines can be dynamically orchestrated, i.e., migrated, resized and duplicated. We will devote a particular attention to IP mobility and virtual network management. Recent proposals made to link intra-datacenter network states to extra-datacenter network states, and to link virtual machine mobility to user mobility will be presented and evaluated.
7 02/05/2017
Software Defined Networking: concept and applications.
OpenFlow. OpenFlow networks: proactive vs reactive control.
Flow Tables.
8 09/05/2017
Open vSwitch. Open vSwitch as an OpenFlow switch.
The Mininet network emulator.
An OpenFlow tutorial with Mininet.
OpenFlow controllers.
The Floodlight OpenFlow controller.
9 16/05/2017 Guded tour to the SCoPE datacenter (Monte S.Angelo campus)
10 23/05/2017 Cloud computing. Cloud service models: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.
An introduction to Amazon AWS basic services: IAM, EC2 and S3.
11 30/05/2017 An introduction to OpenStack.
OpenStack: installation with DevStack and a quick tour.
OpenStack dashboard and CLI commands.
Storage technologies for datacenters: DAS, NAS and SAN.
Fibre Channel. Network convergence. iSCSI. Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
12 06/06/2017 WAN interconnection of datacenters.
Metro Ethernet. Extended Layer-2 networks. Ethernet over MPLS. VPLS.
IEEE 802.1ad (Q-in-Q). MPLS. VXLAN ed NVGRE.
TCP performance problems in datacenter networks. TCP Incast.
Datacenter-specific TCP variants: DCTCP.

Main textbook

  • Cloud Networking: Understanding Cloud-based Data Center Networks.
    Gary Lee.
    Morgan Kaufmann Pub, 2014
    ISBN: 978-0128007280

Scientific papers to be studied


Other complementary textbooks

  • Learning OpenStack Networking (Neutron): Architect and Build a Network Infrastructure for Your Cloud Using Openstack Neutron Networking.
    James Denton.
    Packt Publishing, 2014
    ISBN: 978-1783983308
  • SDN: Software Defined Networks.
    Thomas D. Nadeau, Ken Gray.
    O'Reilly Media, 2013
    ISBN: 978-1449342302
  • Cloud computing per applicazioni web.
    J. Barr.
    Apogeo, 2010
    ISBN: 978-8850329083
 

Standards documents

Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard - Part 1: General Requirements
Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard - Part 2: Balanced Twisted-Pair Cabling Components
Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard - Part 3: Optical Fiber Cabling Components
Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers
ONF Technical Library

Other references

Other courses on "Cloud and Datacenter Networking" in the world

Web sites of interest

News

Photo galleries

YouTube videos of interest for this course


Exam schedule a.a. 2016-2017


Previous editions of this course


roberto.canonico at unina.it

Last update: September 29, 2017